ESPN Gets It Right by Getting Serious

What do you when you are in the business of covering sports and, suddenly, there are no sports to cover?

If you’re a newspaper sports section, your strategy is not complicated. You print fewer pages.

If you’re a radio talk show, you perform a public service. You shut down the switchboard, hold all calls about Barry Bonds and the San Diego Chargers and link up with an all-news program dispensing important information about the disaster unfolding on the other side of the country.

If you’re CNN/SI, you drop the last two initials and borrow the news feed from your parent network.

But what if your initials are ESPN and your sole order of business is to provide round-the-clock sports programming to a nation that, in deference to the dead, has canceled or postponed all sports programming?

Perspective and restraint are two words seldom used in the same paragraph with ESPN, but the network, to borrow a popular “SportsCenter” catch phrase, stepped up by stepping back in the aftermath of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Tuesday night, as a nation’s shock had begun to dissipate and dissolve into horror and sorrow, ESPN got serious. This meant a “SportsCenter” set without Dan Patrick, without Kenny Mayne, without Stuart Scott. This was no time for boo-yah.

Viewers instead received a “special report” delivered, minus the pulsating music and the pop-pow graphics, by a somber Bob Ley and Trey Wingo. Ley, an ESPN veteran who deserves a higher slot on the Bristol marquee but lacks the requisite hip/ironic/smirk-along-with-me credentials, was the right man for the assignment. Ley has no hey-look-at-me catch phrase, but he’s a journalist who understands the definition of the job description, and he lent the proper weight and gravity to the proceedings.

Wingo provided able assistance, opening the show with this introduction:

“Welcome to ‘SportsCenter.’ A ‘SportsCenter’ unlike perhaps any other here in the history of ESPN.

“As then-baseball commissioner Fay Vincent said after the earthquake that disrupted the 1989 World Series: Our issue is very modest compared to the disaster that has hit this community. Or, in this case, this nation.”

Tuesday, Ley said, “that sentiment is magnified a thousand-fold. Sports is an afterthought. We fully appreciate that. We know that you do as well. Still, there is news to report.”

With that, Ley and Wingo launched into the news--no frills, no cheap sentiment. This was “SportsCenter” for adults.

First, a report and accompanying graphic on various sporting events that had been canceled Tuesday. Then, updates on major league baseball, which moved quickly to postpone games, and the NFL, which wanted to wait a couple of days before making a decision.

Pro football correspondent Chris Mortensen said he talked to eight to 10 NFL executives and “about 80% did not want to proceed” with Sunday’s games. But, Mortensen added, “there are some logistical problems” and concerns expressed by the minority view: Should the league cut back to a 15-game season, as it did during the strike season of 1987? Should it move the Super Bowl back a week? (Not likely to happen, Mortensen noted.) And what about the Chargers, who have a bye this week? Is it fair for them to play 16 games and the rest of the league 15?

Problems that are “a bit trivial at this point,” Mortensen acknowledged.

More pressing were concerns for the safety of athletes traveling from stadium to stadium in the air, security at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics and the death of two King scouts in the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. ESPN addressed them all, and for once let the story be the story, instead of the talking heads who are telling the story.

Wingo got a bit emotional during his wrapup: “And that will do it for ‘SportsCenter’ on a day where we realize that sports is most insignificant. But what is important is the cornerstones that founded this country are still intact and they will be the foundation upon which we rebuild.” But on a day when members of Congress gathered for an a cappella version of “God Bless America,” a little heart-in-the-throat sentiment was excusable.

Wednesday, ESPN devoted much of its coverage to reaction from the sports world--about the tragedy itself and the response, or lack thereof, of sports leagues and organizations in the aftermath.

In the process, ESPN delivered this first-time development: Lee Corso as the voice of reason.

Corso, the clown dunce of college football analysts, expressed outrage that certain colleges were planning to go ahead with games this Saturday as scheduled.

‘You know how many thousands of people got killed in this thing?” Corso asked increduously. “If they can’t change the game and they’re going to lose a couple thousand bucks.... I can’t believe the kind of a message we send to our people or our players. I don’t see how a coach can get his guys together and say, ‘Let’s go out and beat these guys.’ They’re taking bodies by boat across the river, aren’t they?

“I’m sorry I’m emotional. But let me tell you something. I love college football more than anybody. It’s been my life all my life. But there’s a place where it stops.

“These terrorists used our planes, our people, our gas to kill thousands of our people. Innocent [people]. And we’re going to go play a game the same week?”

Corso was right on, except for one point. ESPN was covering a difficult story the way it had to be covered, detached when it had to be, passionate when the circumstances required. No need to apologize for any of it.